An Independent Game Developer’s Diary

So I’ve gotten a twitter account (twitter.com/mibgames if you care) and I’ve noticed a couple of things.

I get followed occasionally by a complete stranger, and I look at their profile.  Some of them are following nearly 2000 people.  Surely that defeats the point of twitter?  I follow only people I either personally know, or people I admire in the podosphere and feel they might say something interesting. But other than that I’m only interested in kearing what interestng people have to say.

Secondly, Twitter came up trumps the other night on Launch night at the Guardian.  We had a question that we couldn’t answer, and were worried about something.  I twittered to one of the devs on the team, and lo and behold 5 minutes later he walked into the office to find out what we wanted.  It turned out he was in the pub just down the road, and got my twitter so popped in to see if he could help.  It was a moment that I don’t think I’ll ever forget.

Simon added a link to his delicious feed yesterday to a sad news story from Yemen.

His comment with the link was ” Not to worry - God says it’s OK.”

I read the article carefully, and it appears that the father believed it was ok to give his daughter in marriage because he was destitute and possible had mental health problems.

The Guy receiving the girl beleived that he was perfectly entitled to a wife so young, and nobody seems to explain why he thinks that.

The law that says it’s ok to marry off your children below the age of 15 is part of Yemeni civil law.

So far I find nothing in this article that suggests that anybody was doing this for religious reasons.

In fact Yemen is primarily Muslim,  with small numbers of Jewish, Christian, and Hindu  as well (According to the CIA world factbook).

IslamAwareness.net says

“Woman has the right to accept or reject marriage proposals. Her consent is a prerequisite to the validity of the marital contract, according to the Prophet’s teaching. It follows that if an “arranged marriage” means the marrying of a female without her consent, then such a marriage may be annulled if the female so wishes:”

and the Sunni body has said

“Marriage in Islam is regulated by certain rules, namely, children must reach puberty and maturity so that they can get married”

So I totally fail to see a religious angle on this story, but Simon as an avowed atheist wanted to make a snide comment about religion, using a non-supportive story as the basis.

Shame on your Simon, that kind of behaviour is normally restricted to the religious bigots that you hate so much.

Ok, so Simon keeps going on at me about not blogging enough.

So here’s my plan:

• I will plan to release at least 1 post a week, minimum.
• I will also attempt to miniblog a lot more often, writing simple posts that are a couple of paragraphs rather than whole articles.

Lets see how that goes

I’ve been prompted to write this, despite my busy schedule, by a posting on gamedesign-l yahoo group that suggests that there a lot of violent games and that to find non violent games you should look at the serious games summit. (actually he was looking for conflict resolution games that dont have violence, which is a bit more specific).

Anyway, I thought about it while making my lunch, and as this is ostensibly my lunch break (thats the bit of the day where I eat and work, as compared to the rest of the day where I just work!) I could blog about this.

We often hear about the violent games that permeate our industry, that all games are violent affairs that will corrupt our childrens brains (much like they castigated rock music, drugs, poxy pinball, tv and movies in years past). I dont think that this is true, so I looked over to my copy of MCV that arrived this morning, which I still get because I think it’s important to keep up on the trade, even if it is more retail based than Develop, and also because it comes weekly, and has the ChartTrack sales charts.

Analysis

I looked over the sales charts, and looked at the top 3 sellers in the UK on platforms Wii, DS, PSP, PS2, XBOX360, PC, PC Budget and All Formats, here is the list.

• Wario Ware: Smooth Moves
• Legend Of Zelda: Twilight Princess
• Wii Play
• New Super Mario Bros
• Brain Training
• Brain Academy
• GTA: Vice City Stories
• PES 6
• FIFA 07
• Need For Speed: Carbon
• Scarface
• Lost Planet: Extreme Condition
• Gears Of War
• Rainbow Six: Vegas
• The Sims
• World of Warcraft
• Sega Rally
• Football Manager 2007
• The Sims 2: Pets

So breaking up by violent to non violent, I make 8 violent to 11 non-violent, with the violent consisting of 5 FPS games, 2 combat oriented games(WOW and Zelda), and SMB, which is arguably violent.

The non-violent games consist of Wario Ware, which is it’s own category, 2 brain training games, 3 simulations, 2 racing games and 3 sports titles.

So I reckon there over 50% of top selling games are non violent in the traditional shooting / stabbing / theowing shells at people sense.

Looking at the Top 40 all formats, Lost Planet is the number 1, but the next top 4 are all non violent, with Canis Canem Edit in 6th place being violent. In fact 10 of the top 20 all formats games are non-violent according to my rating system, and 19 of the top 40.

Summary

So what does this say to us? Well firstly, violent games do sell, and sell remarkably well, accounting for half of the top 40 crossplatform sales this week, but suprisngly even to me, the other half are all non-violent.

Secondly, it seems that Pc game players love simulation games more than anything else, with 5 of the budget price pc games being The Sims, and 3 of the Full price top 10 being The Sims 2, and Football Manager and Champ Man also present.

So my final thoughts (ala Jerry Springer) is be excellent to one another, and remember that you don’t have to look totally outside the box to find non-violent games on your console

Emma Nash writes in itWeek that previously people said that having only 39% of the country having broadband was indicating a digital divide between the rich and poor has been proved false by the eAdmissions national project being so readily taken up.
Now skipping the staggering jump of logic (Yes, because people used an online system to choose their secondary school in places like Hertfordshire and Hackney, we can see that poorer people have and want broadband!) It’s a reminder that today 39% of people have broadband.
For us indie developer, it means that you can count on at least 2 in 5 visitors to your site will be on broadband speeds (more if you target the 4 countries with better takeup, Holland, Sweden, Japan and Spain). So take your pick when it comes to making your games distributable, small files for non-broadband users, or big content fillled files for the wealthy broadband elite?